What is CentOS?

CentOS stands for Community Enterprise Operating System and is the result of a group of open source contributors and users working together to develop Linux solutions that are freely available to users who do not require a great deal of commercial support to achieve their goals. CentOS is the most popular Linux distribution for web servers with almost 30% of all Linux servers using it.

CentOS is an enterprise-class Linux distribution based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. As per the GPL license, Red Hat provides the sources of it’s Linux distribution for free to the public. CentOS rebrands those sources and distributes them freely. CentOS conforms fully with Red Hat’s upstream distribution policy, and aims to be 100% binary compatible. The distribution of CentOS products complies completely with Red Hat’s redistribution policy.

Each CentOS version is supported for 7 years by means of security and maintenance updates. A new CentOS version is released every 2 years and each is periodically updated about every 6 months to support newer hardware and address vulnerabilities. This results in a secure, low-maintenance, reliable, predictable and reproducible Linux environment.

The Goals of CentOS

CentOS dedicated Linux servers and distributions are developed by a team of core developers who are supported by a user community comprised of system administrators, network administrators, enterprise users, managers, core Linux contributors, and Linux enthusiasts all over the world.

CentOS is committed to:

Creating solutions that are easily maintained.

Usability for long-term production environments.

A user and package maintainer friendly environment.

Supporting the core for the long-term.

Actively working toward the development of additional solutions.

A strong community infrastructure.

An open management policy.

An open business model.

Commercial support through its partner vendors, like Vault Networks.

CentOS Solutions

Vault Networks will install and support the latest releases of CentOS and any legacy releases customers might require. CentOS supports the vast majority of hardware, and is available as both 32 bit and 64 bit installations.